~ PRANKS & HUMOR INDEX ~

For April Fools Day '98 I had devised a devious little prank that took advantage on a browser bug. When set up on a META tag, which still worked in sigs, one saw a brief message: "KISS YOUR MAIL GOODBYE", then were transported to their mail page where they were greeted with a "you have no mail" message. All one had to do was reload and their mail list came back, but until realized that, some people were understandably upset.

April Fools Day '99 was approaching and I had nothing planned. It was only on that last day I finally came up with a concept: a detailed account of a hack of WTV's UK service. By then, enough knowledge had been gained from getting back into Testdrive that the story could seem plausable. But it had to have the right mix of material people wanted to believe in, some sense of frustration on our part that that we could not get to see all we wanted, and some pictures to boot.

I enlisted Mattman as an accomplice... afterall, I needed to borrow his name for one of the stories main characters... and also so he could put the pictures I sent him up on his Secrets Pics Site.

The story was pretty straight forward... even inventing the new features allgedly found at the UK service. All I had to do was borrow some features from what PCs already had.

Some of the pictures proved to be problemmatic. Coming up with a new Killer Willie site would be easy, but if I borrowed page code to recreate a mail page, then all the missing spacer images would have to be removed. I'd also have to be careful not to leave the curson on a pink link when I sent the pictures to Matt. Given that the pic Matt would post would be low resolution jpegs, and knowing no one would be able examine the page code, I was comfortable taking some shortcuts. Those original pages are still here: